Jensen, Laura: Memory (HB)

Dragon Gate, hardcover

Publication Date: January 1, 1982

Publisher Marketing:

For a good ten years I've been reading Laura Jensen's poems. Memory represents an enlargement of her emotional range. She has always had an enigmatic quality that attracted me; she often recasts her frame of reference several times inside her poems, creating entirely new mental and emotional spaces. Now she adds heart and wisdom. And I think she may also be the Einstein of the ordinary. Take 'Lipstick'--it will never be the same once you read this poem."

--Tess Gallagher

Is it Laura Jensen's highly individual tone of voice, terse or sinewy or lyrical by unexpected turns? Her daring and genuinely dreamlike changes of time and tense and place? Her vivid and startlingly imaginative discoveries of the extraordinary within the ordinary? Whatever the literary ingredients may be, she has used them to make magical, permanent poems.

--David Wagoner

Laura Jensen was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1948. She received degrees from The University of Washington and The University of Iowa, where she attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Washington State Arts Commission the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Reader's Digest Fund. Ms. Jensen has published seven collections of poems including Bad Boats, Memory, and Shelter.